More news of interest for Mac and iOS users came out of today’s Microsoft BUILD conference for developers, as the company announced cross-platform add-ins to integrate third-party apps and services into the Office platform. The company also announced tools to allow iOS developers to easily make versions of their apps for the Windows 10 platform.
Microsoft’s add-ins will for the Office platform will allow a number of third-party apps and services to integrate with multiple versions of Office, including on iOS, and presumably OS X. Uses for the add-ins include building Uber into Outlook to allow users to setup rides directly from their calendar. Also shown this morning was PicHit, which offers a photo marketplace from directly within the PowerPoint app.
The implementation seems to be similar to Apple’s use of app extensions, allowing third-party apps to interact in new ways. Microsoft showed off third-party apps integrated into Office on an iPad and an iPhone 6.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the deep integration is designed to prevent users from needing to jump from app to app to get their work done.
Microsoft will also be making it easier for iOS and Android developers to port their apps over to Windows 10, by releasing new tools that will allow compiling Objective C code using Microsoft Visual Studio to quickly create Windows 10 apps.
During the conference executives demonstrated an iPad app that had been converted to a Windows 10 app using the new tools.
Android apps will be even easier to port to the Windows 10 environment, as the platform includes “an Android subsystem” to support the Java and C++ code that are already used to build Android apps. Such moves by Microsoft, if successful, would certainly help remedy the long-time downside to the Windows mobile platform when it comes to the number of apps available for the platform when compared to iOS and Android.
Microsoft also today unveiled Visual Studio Code for the Mac, a cross-platform code editor for OS X.
(Via MacRumors)
